Filming a 3D video of a virus with instantaneous light and AI

It is millions of trillions of times brighter than the sunlight and a whopping 1,000 trillionth of a second, appropriately called the instantaneous light. It is the X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) light that opens a new scientific paradigm. Combining it with AI, an international research team has succeeded in filming and restoring the 3D structure of nanoparticles that share structural similarities with viruses. With the fear of a new pandemic growing around the world due to COVID-19, this discovery is attracting the attention among academic circles for imaging the structure of the virus with both high accuracy and speed. An international team of researchers from POSTECH, National University of Singapore (NUS), KAIST, GIST, and IBS have successfully analyzed the structural heterogeneities in 3D structures of nanoparticles by irradiating thousands of nanoparticles per hour using the XFEL at Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL) in Korea and restoring 3D multi-models through machine learning....